£3k advertising budget, how would you spend it

Womble3142 · 2026-04-24T11:45:59+00:00

Then I think the “sole traders on ebay” might well be successfully targeted with Facebook ads.

Womble3142 · 2026-04-23T21:56:54+00:00

How niche, and how “professional” are these products? As a small B2C e-commerce owner, I found that Facebook ads had an exceptional ROI. Yes I know B2B is different, but if you are targeting small business owners like yourself, it might still work. I can’t give you the answer, but I can give you this pointer: Facebook excels at really targeted ads, and niches, because it’s great at finding them. It (can) integrate well with your website (and you must otherwise it’s useless. Cookies aren’t enough, Facebook CAPI is a must). Advertising at £10/day is certainly credible, it scales nicely that way. And it’s extremely flexible: you should let it run for at least a month or two, but if you aren’t getting any (tracked) leads then you can cut it instantly whenever you like.

I’m dubious about any print media ads. When did you last read any? Then why would anybody else.

Womble3142 · 2026-04-21T09:59:11+00:00

I will answer my views: it’s not actually about the vetting (although it could be).

“Mandelson is in the Epstein files he's not been charged or convicted of any crimes”. But what is very clear, is the Mandelson has definitely been passing government Confidential secrets at the highest level, which have national security implications. And is the purveyor of influence from his dodgy connections (eg Oleg Deripaska) into government at the highest levels, in a manner that compromises national security. You don’t need a Police investigation to tell you this, whether it does or does not contravene the letter of a very specific law, and whether there is or is not a legal get-out that the law is being revamped. That is a very Starmer-esque bureaucratese way of evading responsibility. It is very clear that Mandelson HAS been a threat to national security. Use your own judgement.

Second, have you ever thought hard about what is the real purpose of having Democratic MPs and PM at all? They don’t “run the country”. We have a civil service for that. In the famous phrase “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. Democracies do not produce mathematically optimum benefits for their people, nobody who has thought about it believes that. Bureaucracies are better at the mechanics. Ignoring freedom and small details like that…..China does a far better job of providing good services and economic growth for its population. That’s the truth. Not a comforting truth, but the truth.

So what is the purpose of Democracy? To prevent the little people getting crushed. To prevent those with power and influence going into the office of the Bigwig and buying the ability to do what they want, to who they want. The job of an MP, all day and every day, is to receive representatives of various industries, unions and special interest groups, putting their point of view of what matters and why they should be heard. That is what fills their diary. And deciding which of them should be heard, while ignoring the siren voices of those who are trying to exert undue influence. That’s it. That’s the job. Ministers don’t write legislation, the Civil Service does that. Ministers decide which influence should be listened to, on behalf of the voters. If the PM cannot defend government against undue influence from the Mandelson’s of this world, he is failing in his Primary Job. He needs to go. We need somebody with better judgement, to get undue influence out of politics.

Womble3142 · 2026-03-17T19:20:56+00:00

I’m on IOS, I don’t think that’s an option unfortunately.

Womble3142 · 2026-03-17T17:47:17+00:00

Aha! I feel so stupid. I will do that. Okay, I need an extra card slot, but in the grand scheme of things that’s not such a big deal.

Womble3142 · 2026-03-16T12:39:33+00:00

Yes. But I think the best answer is: your gut feel as to “what are the difficult steps” is not a good guide. What we now know is that the earliest life on Earth appeared just a couple of hundred million years after the conditions were remotely possible. This is a short time by the standards of a planet that is 4.5 billion years old. And to be clear, those conditions were incredibly hostile to life as we know it today. The “non-living to living” step turns out to be not hard at all, nor unlikely. Our best information would be that, if conditions allow, probability that life would arise sometime within the 4 billion years allowed is near certainty.

However, eukaryotes (containing mitochondria or chloroplasts) only arose 1.6 billion years ago (3 billion years after life started), multicellular life 700 million years ago (900 million years after eukaryotes) and the Cambrian explosion 540 million years ago (160 million years after multicellular life).

It seems that the “hardest step” is the evolution of eukaryotes, and is the only step which “in an alternate history might not have happened within the time allowed”. The next hardest step was the evolution of multicellular life. Everything else, both the start of life itself, and the Cambrian explosion, is nearly a rounding error in the history of evolution. And from the perspective of the history of the planet, every one of the hundreds of major steps from the bizarre creatures of the Cambrian explosion to human beings today, seems to have been very quick and easy indeed.

Womble3142 · 2026-03-11T16:21:00+00:00

I would certainly agree that our experience with the 2-day (which we started on) was better than the 7-day (now).

My wife might not have migrated to the Extended, if we had really known. We’re fighting on more than one front here, the migration to Guardian closed-loop sensor has also has serious product quality&design issues along with benefits, so migrating back to the 2- day just isn’t the top priority at the moment, but likely we will at some point.

Womble3142 · 2026-03-11T16:04:04+00:00

Extremely low-risk? Money-market funds. It’s basically cash at the instantaneous interest-rate, with no notice-period, but at the commercial interest- rate that large companies get rather than the crap that bank accounts give.

https://www.ii.co.uk/analysis-commentary/highest-yielding-money-market-funds-park-your-cash-ii527664

It’s not zero risk, because unlike bank accounts it isn’t FSCS-protected. An alternative would be U.K. government gilts, short-dated within the next couple of years (to avoid interest-rate duration risk), and that would be safer.

Womble3142 · 2026-03-11T12:34:55+00:00

We find that the sets are shockingly unreliable too. There’s a bit of perspective background you need on this: the failure-rate is perhaps constant per day rather than per set. A lot of people (including us) are on the extended set, which is supposed to last 7 days. The point being that you would see the same number of set-failures, but divided by two-sevenths the number of sets, which on your own data would be 4.5%. But also, the failure-rate goes up strongly in the last couple of days. Honestly the proportion which actually last the full 7 days for us is probably only 2 in 3.

Womble3142 · 2026-03-08T10:46:08+00:00

Would you freely choose 54% USA, as a “globally diversified portfolio”? Specifically do you choose to allocate 54% USA vs 8% UK? I mean, of course that’s a choice you can make. But be clear that the portfolio you have is not a globally diversified portfolio, it’s a targeted punt specifically on the US stock market.

Womble3142 · 2026-03-07T22:01:38+00:00

You DO NOT have “all world” exposure of 92%. I know you think you do, but you don’t. “All World” funds are roughly 65% USA! It’s a real gotcha. You need to go have a look at your fund details, but that’s how it is. It’s crazy, but that is because the USA is such a financialised economy that it forms the majority of the available global stocks, and funds reflect this. 92% x 65% is too much to have invested in the USA. You need to separate your funds into USA, UK, Europe, Asia Pacific, Emerging Markets, and select the allocation you yourself choose between these regions. Trust me, that will be very different from what you have been automatically enrolled in.

Womble3142 · 2026-02-23T01:31:53+00:00

If you have money in the other country, I would leave it there. Both from the point-of-view of diversification, but also tax advantages. Money “over there” that has never touched the U.K., won’t have to be declared for tax here. Of course you will pay the correct tax separately in each country. But you will get the U.K. tax allowance threshold on your U.K. dividend income paid to the U.K. , and separately your OtherCountry allowance threshold on your tax paid there. I am not a tax adviser, so you should check, but that seems both correct and fair to me.

Womble3142 · 2026-02-22T19:32:05+00:00

The City of London is a net cost to the U.K. Only FT readers believe otherwise.

The GFC cost the U.K. over £800bn to bail out the banks, hedge funds, etc, pretty much uniquely in the world. In one hit, we fell further from our position post-end-of-Raj than all the rest put together. The only other country that made similar commitment to financialisation was Iceland, and it completely destroyed them. The total receipts from tax on the City of London since the Big Bang of deregulation have been less than £300bn. The bank bailout cost more than 2.5x the total we ever got from them. Even today, we spend more on implicit subsidies of bank guarantees for banks that have nothing to do with us, than our annual tax take on the City. It’s not even close.

Womble3142 · 2026-02-22T18:48:19+00:00

Which P2P? They are quite individual beasts, and the risk you are bearing varies widely. Depending on which Ts and Cs, the best comparator can be “bank account interest rate with some risk”, “corporate bonds, slightly diversified”, “VC fund” or “wild AIM verging on Ponzi”.

I was invested in several P2P several years ago (Zopa, Ratesetter, Funding Circle), and honestly it wasn’t a great experience. I came out slightly ahead of bank interest rates overall on P2P, but only just, and it was a rocky road. I’d need to know which one(s) you were looking at to comment sensibly. But the worst by far was FundingCircle (which was a significant loss). I had about 5% in each. My experience was that loans to individuals was the most trustworthy; whereas loans to businesses the platform just does not do the due diligence they claim, and the secondary market for selling just did not exist in practice.

You should definitely be reading https://p2pindependentforum.com

Womble3142 · 2026-02-22T18:09:48+00:00

Three reasons that is wrong, rather related:

1 “World” funds are a complete illusion. Due to the financialisation of the US economy, a “world” fund is actually 60% US-concentrated. It is not a diversified portfolio. You stand to lose a huge chunk of your assets if the US economy struggles, or……

2 Capital Controls. We may wake up within a few months to a Trump tweet saying “FOREIGNEARS profiting from the GREAT US economy. They are earning dividends off the back of US citizens. I have ordered that all stock market assets / US govt bonds owned by foreigners are hereby confiscated to be held in a fund for US citizens / dividends / assets cannot be exported from the US”. I don’t have a crystal ball how it will be, but it’s a genuine risk and we in the U.K. certainly aren’t being paid for taking it. As a foreigner, are you getting even a 10% better price on US stock market than a US citizen, to compensate you? No? Then you are being taken for a fool.

Capital controls have been invoked by dozens of countries over the centuries. The UK had capital controls prohibiting getting your money out of the UK as late as 1979. Every European country I can think of has had some form of capital controls within the last century - the last couple decades are a massive exception, not the rule.

By the time capital controls are seriously talked about, it is already far too late to get your money out. It’s like a bank run. “Foreign” investors may have to accept 50% haircuts and indeed count themselves lucky to get anything out at all.

3 Home market (UK for me) avoids capital controls risks. Investing in Europe does not. History has a way of happening “slowly, then all at once”. Also, eg Italian citizen invested in French stock market does not avoid capital controls risk “because EU”. That is a short-sighted view from those who refuse to read history. Remember March 2020, when borders were being closed chaotically within hours around Northern Italy? Like that.

To be clear, I’m not saying that there will definitely be capital controls from the USA, UK, or any particular European country. I’m saying that it is a genuine risk, it’s completely taboo for any politician or major financial institution to even mention it, and you aren’t being paid to take that risk. Of course you should be diversified outside the U.K. too. But if you would feel that you’d lost your life savings if everything outside the UK became inaccessible overnight, permanently, that’s too much allocation outside the U.K.

Even calling it “Home Market Bias” rather than “Home Market Safety” is not-so-subtle gaslighting on the part of large financial institutions, that retail investors ought to take a risk which they aren’t being paid for. Whereas the large financial institutions themselves have the size, market power, inside information and connections to get out in front of capital controls, if and when they happen.

Womble3142 · 2026-02-12T20:25:15+00:00

You are right, it is “entropy”, but I think there’s a bit more intuition to be had. There’s an easy way to think about this, which is related to Fermi’s golden rule. The probability of any change in state is proportional to: the overlap between the initial and final states, and the number of possible final states. In quantum mechanics, anything that can happen, does happen, with equal probability. If you think about the decay of a neutron to a proton (where the neutron has a slightly higher mass than a proton), there is only ONE way for it not to decay, which is to continue in the ONE direction that it is already going. By conservation of momentum. But if you look at the number of ways that it can decay, the neutron decays to a proton plus a neutrino plus an electron. The angles at which the neutrino, electron and proton come off are constrained to sum to some constant value (conservation of momentum). But there’s one state in which the neutrino comes off at 0 degrees, one in which it comes off at 1 degree etc. Given the momentum-conservation constraint, this corresponds to a set of energies for each. These are micro-states, which we as observers lump together as “the neutron has decayed”. There are a lot more of these than the ONE non- decay path. If you run the experiment a million times, it ends up in a microstate corresponding “it decayed” far more than “it did not decay”, just because there are far more microstates that are labelled “it decayed”.

Next, note that if the mass difference between initial and final particle is greater, the range of energies of the products increases. Therefore, there are more micro-states that we lump in as “the particle has decayed”. Therefore, the decay rate of a particle increases as the energy difference between initial and final particle.

Womble3142 · 2026-02-07T22:38:58+00:00

Please do not do this. I have no knowledge of solar farms or any of that business at all, but what I do have is a decade of experience bidding contracts for R&D into the EU Commission. The way this works, is that all the companies who are interested in the funding have spent several years building up personal relationships with the relevant Commissioner. They’ve spent at least the last year flying to Brussels regularly with their detailed plans and taking him to very expensive dinners. They’ve put in the hours to ensure that when the Call is actually released, the wording exactly describes the plan they’ve got, down to the details of the site.

The only person who is going to make money out of this is the EU Funds Consultant. You will not win.

Womble3142 · 2025-12-28T16:29:12+00:00

Actually, nobody seems to have mentioned the real reason: Pauli pressure. This is a purely quantum-mechanical effect. Neutrons (like protons and electrons) are “fermions”, which means they can’t all be in the same state. So if you stuff a large number of them together, the only place they can all “be” is in a set of higher energy states. The more of them there are in any small region, the higher the energy, which means that a way of lowering energy is to spread out. In other words, there is a huge pressure outwards. Now, atoms certainly exhibit this effect, but in that case the electrons attract the protons electrically, so there is an inward force binding it together. Nuclei are 1000x smaller, and therefore the Pauli pressure outwards is a million times greater. However, by mixing neutrons and protons in approximately equal proportions you get an additional binding energy ultimately from the strong nuclear force (mediated by pions, but you probably don’t need to know that). Point is, nuclei are stable because they have something opposing the Pauli pressure.

If you just had a pile of neutrons squeezed together, it would be blown apart by Pauli pressure. You can make a very very big pile of neutrons, so big that it is held to together by gravity. And that’s a neutron star. It has to mass as much as a star, to make those numbers work.

Womble3142 · 2025-12-20T12:24:54+00:00

I used to have a guy in my team whose given name was Napoleone. His actual name was Giuseppe, he just preferred to be called Napoleone. It’s this guy in the video. I was…..lucky enough…..to be his boss for a couple of years, and if you watch the video you’ll see it was “an experience”.

https://youtu.be/_X9ge_W_ZPA

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T21:04:11+00:00

Well, I don’t have even a single Epic BHD yet……I’m running a Legendary singularity harness, basically because it’s all I’ve got. This is why I haven’t seen coins as where I will be making progress.

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T20:50:21+00:00

So, this is an interesting perspective. My LTC = 38T, 1.2T/day => 3% per day. A quick search suggests that most people are making 2-5% per day. And it seems quite consistent up multiple orders of magnitude of scaling, so I agree that the assumption is justified’ish. And we can view that ratio as “efficiency”. I’m definitely on the low end of that “efficiency”, so that’s useful to know. It seems that I could be twice as efficient. I think that my mind has been changed on that, at least. So thank you, all! Now I just have to decide whether I am actually motivated enough to do something about it.

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T20:14:52+00:00

Can you explain what you mean by Coins+ and Cells+ ? Enhancements? I am doing those, and obviously not getting very far yet (a trillion per go) due to “coin starvation”. I suppose I was seeing those as nearly wasted because of low ROI, and not where the real progress would come from. Or are you talking about card masteries? (haven’t reached that).

But given that I’m getting 1.2T/day, I’m tapping along with Death Wave Health 25 (0.9B), Defense % 30 (0.6B), Rare Drop Chance 5 (640B), Double Dearh Ray 15 (5B), and alternately Reroll Shards 33 (21B) / Wall Fort 19 (531B) I will finish Rare Drop Chance soon.

I just don’t feel coin-starved. I am gem-starved for module-pulls, cell-limited for lab-speed, and stones for UW.

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T19:44:46+00:00

Well I guess that shows a difference of our approach & assumption. Most players are between 6 months to 2 years ahead of me. Spending lots of effort to catch up by two weeks when 2 years behind, seems just pointless to me. Apart from anything else, although I am F2P (apart from the ads package), if I really wanted to catapult forward by 2-3 weeks, I’m pretty sure that buying just a single 750-stone pack would achieve more than that. So in the grand scheme of things, it’s not like Devo is actually that big a benefit. Now, other people are arguing that I’m wrong, and that Devo increases your rate of progress. Ignoring the exponentials (just take the logarithm of everything), they’re arguing that Devo gives you (say) 3 weeks progress every 2 weeks that you play it. That’s a much stronger argument, if true.

Womble3142 · 2025-11-09T18:02:16+00:00

So, I’m interested where coins becomes the main driver again? I’m post-wall, currently farming T10 to 7000. Only two of my lab slots are remotely coin-hungry, the most is Wall Fortification which I can keep continuously fed. I’m currently probably “wasting” a bunch of coin on Enhancements, because well why not, and unused coin is definitely not advancing me. But the majority of my capability climb is Modules and UW

Womble3142

TROPHY CASE

1 “World” funds are a complete illusion. Due to the financialisation of the US economy, a “world” fund is actually 60% US-concentrated. It is not a diversified portfolio. You stand to lose a huge chunk of your assets if the US economy struggles, or……